Yahoo News Spencer Milligan, ‘Land of the Lost’ Star, Dies at 86
Spencer Milligan, who starred for Sid and Marty Krofft as the park ranger and widowed father Rick Marshall on the iconic Saturday morning kids show Land of the Lost, has died. He was 86.
Milligan died April 18 at his home in Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin, his family announced.
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Milligan played the heroic father of youngsters Will Marshall (Wesley Eure) and Holly Marshall (Kathy Coleman) on the first two seasons of NBC’s Land of the Lost, which featured a mix of live-action and stop-motion animated dinosaurs. On the sci-fi show, the family is caught in an earthquake while on a rafting trip and propelled into an alternative universe.
“Sid and Marty Krofft didn’t just cast our TV family, they created, for the cast, a lifelong loving family in real life,” Eure said Wednesday in a statement. “Today I have been overwhelmed by thousands of fans, reaching out to tell me how Spencer‘s performance as Rick Marshall helped guide their young lives. He truly was the dad everybody wanted to have. I will miss his kindness, his talent, his heart and most especially, his enormous capacity for humor. Rest in peace, papa!”
Adds Coleman: “One of my signature lines from the show was, ‘Daddy, do something!’ Well, he most certainly did. He not only became the father figure I needed but a father to all the other children in need of that missing puzzle piece.”
The show made Milligan famous, with his likeness and those of his co-stars appearing on Land of the Lost products like lunch boxes, toys and coloring books, but he quit the show because he said he wasn’t getting paid for that. “We had a difference of opinion, let’s put it this way,” he told the Associated Press in 2009. “I thought it was only fair that everyone should get their fair share.”
At the start of the third season, Milligan was replaced by Ron Harper, who came aboard as Rick’s brother, Jack. The writers explained all this by having Rick sucked through a time doorway and then Jack stumbling upon his niece and nephew after having embarked on a search to find them.
Spencer James Milligan was born on Sept. 10, 1937, in Oak Park, Illinois. He attended Lyon’s Township High School, trained at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago and received a nice notice for his turn in Come Back, Little Sheba on a Windy City stage in 1960.
After serving in the U.S. Army through 1966, Milligan studied acting with Lee Strasberg in New York and with Joan Darling in Los Angeles and made his onscreen debut as a party host in the future in Woody Allen’s Sleeper (1973).
Milligan later showed up episodes of such shows as Gunsmoke, Baretta, McCloud, The Bionic Woman, Alice, The Dukes of Hazzard, Police Squad! and The New Mike Hammer.
For the past 20 years, he taught classes and directed plays at Third Avenue PlayWorks in Sturgeon Bay.
Survivors include his wife, Kerry, whom he met in August 1991 in Sturgeon Bay and married in December 2002, and his godchildren, Andee, Hilary and Spencer.
Donations in his memory can be made to the Entertainment Community Fund, formerly known as The Actors Fund.
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